


Ghosts

by Enygmass



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: we love a good haunted house
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-06 22:55:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16396655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enygmass/pseuds/Enygmass
Summary: People always said that if you looked to the Manor windows at the right moment, in the right spot, you could see the Ghosts. You could see the Ghosts, but you better hope they couldn't see you back.





	Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> This was just for Halloween tbh.

It was a dark stain. The landscape was picturesque, appearing as though it were ripped right from the scenic moment on a postcard, but it was marred by that dark stain. There were neat rows of corn, blue skies, little cars that drove steadily on by, but all of it was ruined by that dark, ugly stain. It looked as though it was built without kindness, as though, despite the mortar between the bricks and the embellishments that lined the porch, the spark of life that finished off a home had been forgotten, left to turn to dust in the high Georgian sun. 

The interior was no better than the exterior. Where the exterior, with its black bricks bleached a dull grey and the wood chipped to splinters in the yellow grass, showed its ability to handle the elements, the interior was coated with a sheet of dust and decorated with cobwebs in the corners like some sick party trick. Welcome home, it seemed to echo, down halls that had been silent for years on end. Welcome home indeed. 

But the home was not without life, although the absence of a hearth and darkness from the windows made it appear so. The people who watched from the town of Arlen below spoke of the ghosts within the walls, who seemed to hover just out of view in the tallest windows. They would whisper that if you looked at the right time, at the right moment, and if you squinted your eyes and leaned forward in your seat just a little bit, you could see them. You could see them, if you really wanted, but you better hope to God that they couldn’t see you back. 

Home was always a funny word on the tongue of someone who hardly knew it. It was a heavy word, a light word, a word with many meanings, but from the chapped lips of a man who had grown within the walls like some parasite, feeding off the misery of those alleged ghosts to fester his own, it meant a carcass. To him, it was a shell on a hill, blanketed in a field of corn that he once knew and once loved and over time had since grown to hate. He had grown to hate it with a passion that replaced the missing hearth of that home with his own burning resentment, which seemed to seep into the walls and make the already rotting foundation even more decayed. 

“Home.” Yes, the word did sound funny on his tongue when he uttered it to an empty master hallway where his only companions were the knockoff roman statues that guarded the stairs. The word even echoed in his head a few times as he made his way up those molded velvet steps with his hand tracing the railing all the way to the windows which once looked nice, yes, but were now so coated with dust you couldn’t see out them at all. It felt nice to finally stand in the house when it was in its true element, rather than the spotless lie that he had grown up in. 

His surname should have been Keeny, but he had always been called Crane. Grandmother had formed some sort of adamance against allowing him to carry on her surname; it always had to be his fathers surname so that the world knew he was nothing but the bastard product of two shattered homes. One time, when he had asked why, she had ceased her cutting of the meat she intended to use that dinner that night and became so unnaturally still in her state that, by the time she finally moved, Jonathan had been near tears with the wrongness of the situation. She had not responded to his question.

To his right, he could see a room. The walls that once might have been a seafoam green were faded out now, with the little bear stencils lining the boarders now nearly scratched away. There was a rocking horse, a chair, and a toy box that sat unmoved in the corner. Jonathan supposed at this rate that if he tried to open it he would be met with resilience. Grime had surely hardened the bolts that held it together. 

When he was five years old, his Grandmother used to lock him in the room by himself as a means of attaining some peace and quiet. At first, Jonathan would cry and knock on the door, but eventually he self-soothed and resigned himself to the various toys that littered the room. It was in this room that he first learned that something wasn’t right in the Manor. It began with scratching in the walls, an action that could already scare a child but was only amplified by the fact that it didn’t stop, followed by knocking, and then full-force banging, as though someone was attempting to get through to him. It had been so strong that a few pictures had even fallen and hit the floor. Jonathan remembered pulling the toys out of the toy box and crawling into it, where he lowered the lid just enough so that there was a crack he could peer out of, lest anything ever crawled into the room. 

Nothing ever did, though, and in due time the noises would cease on their own. Whenever he asked his Grandmother about it she would give the same half-hearted response of ‘pipes in the walls’, but Jonathan had always been an observant boy. It wasn’t hard to see the way her gaze would linger on the corners of the room for just a moment too long before she would grip her skirt and leave. 

The playroom had been locked up when he was seven as a punishment. It was only open now because the wood had been chewed away by unseen insects, loosening the hinges enough for the door to collapse in on itself. Jonathan wondered if the bang from that noise had scared the neighbors enough to keep them from ever entering. 

This wasn’t where he intended to linger, however, and he was already moving past the playroom as the last trails of that thought left his mind. His gaze was set firmly on a red door ahead, the one door that was still standing in this house, unopened since he had closed it firmly on that final night. His hand extended and touched the brass knob, pale fingers wrapping around dark copper, and with a sharp twist the deafening screech of parts unturned for twenty-odd years sounded their protest as the door was forced open with one firm shove. The smell of musk captured his senses, and as he stepped past the threshold into that room that held no light, 

“You are not him, and you never will be.” 

An eleven-year-old boy sat on a chair with a teddy bear in his hands. The woman at the church had told him that every boy and girl needed a teddy bear, for that was how their guardian angels saw them, and when Jonathan had answered that he didn’t have one, she had gone and bought one for him herself. Jonathan had brought it to her funeral no more than a week later. 

“Who?” The question sounded so naïve for an answer already known. Jonathan had found the pictures in the vanity, the pictures of the boy he looked almost identical to, although one had been born from a woman of god and one had been born from a woman of grief. That was their prominent difference.

“You know who. I know you like to dig through things that aren’t yours when you think I’m not around, but I am always around. God holds no secrets and my ears are always open to his word.” In the haze of the memory he could not make out the expression his Grandmother wore on her face, although he imagined her lips were pinched to a thin line and her dark eyes narrowed with distaste. Mary Keeny always did have her ear turned to God, and she always had her gaze turned to him as well. In fact, she had her eyes turned to God so often that she forgot to turn them to her son, who lay bound in iron in his bed [ Jonathan’s bed ] at the tender age of eleven, until the rattling of a last breath filled the room as the grip of polio finally shut down his lungs. With this, Mary Keeny had turned her gaze back to man after so long, but by then it was too late. He was buried in the garden. Jonathan knew this because he had dug up a bone last week. 

“How come we have the same name then?” If he was not he, and he never would be, why did they share so many similarities? His train of thought had been ceased by the sound of his Grandmothers hand hitting the table; no breath escaped his lips then. 

“Because you were given by God as the consequences of my actions. I keep your presence as a reminder of what I failed to do, you are the embodiment of a failure, and so you are aptly named so. You are not him because he was sweet, young, and so full of good while what you are full of is maliciousness, and spite, and evil so that when I look at your face, when I look at my Jonathan’s face, I do not see my sweet boy, but instead I see the product of my sins.” 

She was close now, so close that he could smell her stale perfume in the air, but when he blinked the eleven-year-old boy was gone and replaced by the thirty-eight-year-old man that he was. That moment in this room had changed him – it had finally opened his eyes to the reality of the situation he was in. There would be no love for Jonathan Crane; all of it had been spent on Jonathan Keeny, and there was nothing left to give. 

This realization replayed in his mind as he moved to the window, the very same window his Grandmother had stood at in that moment, and he looked out to the town of Arlen below.   
The Manor did not have ghosts. The Manor had lies, it had undocumented crimes that stained the walls that started far before Mary Keenys reign, but had ended with Jonathan Cranes. The Manor was nothing but a hollow carcass that sat on a hill, acting as a dark stain on the history and landscape of such a picturesque town. If it had ghosts, they were silent, caught in the repeating moments of their lives that had occurred in the horrific past that built this home. 

No. If the Manor had ghosts, there was only one now, and if the people of Arlen feared that the ghost in the manor could see them back, he could.


End file.
